It’s time to build the housing we need for the future of Metro Vancouver.
To address the twin crises of housing affordability and climate change, the region specifically needs more “missing middle” housing between the extremes of detached (“single-family”) homes and large condo towers. An aggressive build-out of affordable housing region-wide is central to creating a more fair and vibrant economy that also rises to the challenge of the climate emergency.
This paper proposes a framework of conditional upzoning, a regulatory shift away from detached housing to allow higher-density development across the region while requiring that all new housing development contributes to greater affordability. In particular, this research aims to enable a growing stock of affordable non-market rental housing (i.e., rents set at 50–80 per cent of median market rent).
